When I go walking down the street,

I do so like to watch my feet.
Perhaps you do not know the news:
Mother has bought me fine new shoes."

I don't remember who wrote that, but it's in "Poems to Read to the Very Young" (a book I highly recommend).

I learned it at an early age, because MY mother always liked buying me shoes. And now, I have discovered, I like buying MY daughter shoes.

Brigid got her first pair of shoes today. Well, okay, the first pair that fit, and that she would consent to walk in. Previously, we've tried putting hard-soled shoes on her feet, and she would cry, and fuss, and refuse to walk until we took them off again.

So today Adam and I headed to the mall, and in a lovely little store called Naartjie, we found SOFT-soled shoes. These look sort of like normal shoes, but they're really built more like moccasins, with soft, almost cloth-like leather soles. After ascertaining that our daughter's incredibly long feet would only fit in the 18-24 month size (sigh), we plopped her down on the bench and put a pair on her.

And you know what? She grinned. So we put her down on the floor, and she walked in them, then stopped, and looked at me, and grinned again. She liked them!

So for the rest of our time at the mall, our little Brie-bird walked around and looked at all the interesting people and pulled things off the shelves, and got into things she shouldn't, but she did it all properly shod!

-Jess